Cynthia Haven - René Girard at the End of Time

2025 McDermott Lecturer Cynthia Haven is a prominent articulator of the work of René Girard, the French-born American historian, literary critic and philosopher whose work belongs to the tradition of anthropological philosophy. He is best known for his theory of mimetic desire. Haven wrote the award-winning Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard in 2018 and edited a Penguin Classics anthology of Girard’s writings, All Desire Is a Desire for Being, which was published earlier this year. She is also the author of 2021’s Czesław Miłosz: A California Life, about the Polish poet.

Transcript

SPEAKER_10 0:00

Good evening and welcome to the 2025 McDermott Lecture at the University of Dallas. So tonight we're gonna have a wonderful lecture on Renee Girard. He was here in 1994, and although he's had a huge impact on a number of academic disciplines, not as many people appreciate uh the breadth of his work and the depth of the influence that he's had. But this year, this week, we at the University of Dallas are going to correct that as much as we can. So, as our community knows well, the McDermott lecture is much more than a one-off event. It's a multi-day event. And this week we had a seminar discussion with faculty and students led by Mark Ansbog, a collaborator with Girard. And last night we were enchanted while watching a new documentary called Things Hidden: The Life and Legacy of Renee Girard. It's a beautiful film, and if you missed it last night, you can watch it for free on YouTube. Just Google or YouTube search, rather, Things Hidden, Life and Legacy of Renee Girard. It's a fantastic introduction to some complex ideas, but everybody that I talked to last night understood the basic concepts really well and are now really ready to engage with the man. I'd like to introduce some special guests, uh, Sam Sorich and Trevor Merrill are the director and producer, respectively, of the film I just mentioned. They're up here on the front row. Professor Bernadette Waterman Ward, are you with us here tonight? She's over here. Bernadette, as usual, has graciously agreed to take on probably way too much work and has led a wonderful series of seminar discussions that will continue after this on Renee Girard's work. And she also studied with Girard uh as a grad student at Stanford. I also want to thank the uh trustees who are joining us and members of our President Society. The President Society recognizes people who donate annually to UD to support things like scholarships, capital improvements, and the general operations of our university. We're very grateful for you and your support. In a moment, we'll hear from President Jonathan Sanford, and after him, our honored guest will deliver her lecture, and we'll follow that with a question and answer period. So please get out your pencils or pens and write down some really good questions for us. We'd like to have a great conversation. It's now my privilege to introduce President Jonathan Sanford, the tenth president of the University of Dallas. President Sanford is a philosopher by training and admirer of Renee Girard's work. Those of us who attended the screening last night learned from Trevor, actually, the producer of the film I just mentioned, that President Sanford is not only an admirer, but also one of the few Thomas philosophers that will cite approvingly Renee Girard. Which makes him, I think, the perfect person to both uh host this event this year and to introduce our beloved speaker, Cynthia Haven. So please join me in welcoming President Sanford.

SPEAKER_12 2:51

Well, thanks for coming out on a Thursday evening. It's such a delight to have you here. As Dr. Ellis was saying, we we've had a week full of reflections on Rene Girard. I hope many of you are already familiar with him. If you are not, you'll become familiar after our address this evening. And like Ashton, I want to thank in a particular way Dr. Waterman Ward, who, when I said, Do you have any interest in leading a seminar on Renee Girard? She said, Yes. And I said, Well, how about soon, like last semester and this semester? And she took that on, and it has been really fruitful. And in fact, it's a it's an interest that she has sustained since her days at Stanford. And this wasn't the first iteration of uh Renee Girard study group. I had high hopes of joining it, but I failed to do so. Something about my day job got in the way. This is the reboot of our McDermott lecture. It's been a couple of years. COVID caused a slowdown in the rate of our lecturers, and we are really excited to begin again. The McDermott Lecture has always been attached in a particular way to the Bran of Graduate School of Liberal Arts, which is our premier program at the University of Dallas. It's where we house the IPS program, the Institute for Philosophical Studies, and our many master's programs in the humanities. The McDermott Lecture is named for Eugene McDermott, who was a prominent scientist and businessman, a civic leader and a philanthropist. And in 1974, Mr. and Mrs. McDermott endowed this lecture series to honor doctors Luis and Donald Cowan. It was Luis who played such a pivotal role in founding the Braniff Graduate School of Liberal Arts and the IPS in particular, and of course, Donald Cowan was and remains a significant president of the University of Dallas in memory now. So they were inspired by the vision of the Cowans, the McDermott's were, and wanted to endow a lecture series that would provide great prominence to the University of Dallas, and indeed it has. Our first McDermott lecturer was Jacques Barzoum. We had the likes of Marshall McLuhan, Mortimer Adler, Hans Gorg Gothamer, Leon Cass, Robert Alter most recently, and as Dr. Ellis said, René Girard back in 1994. I didn't realize until I was talking to Dr. Bill Frank yesterday that it was Bill who secured Rene Girard back in the 90s. And he shared some delightful remembrances of ways in which Girard interacted with his children around his dinner table. And that was a high point in Bill's career. We really are honored to have as our lecturer this year Cynthia L. Haven. She is a public intellectual, an award-winning author, a journalist, and an independent scholar. Her publications include a biographical study called Evolution of Desire, A Life of Renee Girard, and an edited anthology of Girard's works entitled All Desire is a Desire for Being, Essential Writings. She's also worked extensively on the Polish and American poet, Cheslaw Meat Wash, if I'm saying that right. And that's entitled A California Life. Haven has held visiting fellowships at the Institute for Human Sciences and Vienna and at Stanford University, Stanford University, which continues to host her blog, The Book Haven, cleverly entitled. So please join me in welcoming Cynthia Haven. The title of her talk is Renee Girard at the End of Time.

SPEAKER_07 7:33

Hello, can you hear me? Is my voice coming through? Yes, it is. Well, it's wonderful to be here. So let me begin. I met Rene Girard in 2007 when his final book, Acheve Clausewitz, was making a storm in Paris. Its impact was seismic. French president Nicolas Sarkozy was citing Rene's words, and reporters were besieging the mild mannered professor at his Paris apartment. The cover of the French edition of the book, published by Grasse, featured the rising mushroom cloud of the atomic bomb. The book, called Battling to the End, in English, showed a new direction in Renee's work, raising questions about our past and our future. The book sold 20,000 copies in the first month. One of Renee's friends, returning from France, told me that the public excitement was so high the reporters had been on Renee's Paris doorstep every day, besieging the elderly thinker, and that he had been concerned about Renee's health. An exaggeration, perhaps, but one that indicates how incendiary the book was at the time. I was already writing about Renee. What should I tell people about this new book? Renee paused and said, You can tell people so as not to scare them that Girard is interested in the apocalyptic elements in modern thinking. It doesn't mean he's biting his nails all the time, waiting for the end of the world. But his aesthetic interest is oriented towards that aspect of the modern psyche. Back in America, the nation that had been his home for 60 years, Renee walked the Stanford campus virtually unnoticed and unrecognized. Thousands of miles away from Paris, an entirely different spirit prevailed at his home on Frenchman's Road. Yes, the coincident of the street name, Frenchman's Road always gets a smile. The English translation was being prepared for an American edition, the nuances of a phrase wrestled out in the living room. At the Girard home, proof sheets were scattered on the floor. The phone was ringing often from France, where the interlocutor for the book-length conversation, Benoit Chantreau, was giving interviews with the French press. Rene was haunted by the events of September 11, 2001, and thought that it marked a milestone in the escalation of violence to extremes. It launched an altogether new phrase. He said, Today's terrorism still needs to be analyzed. We haven't grasped the fact that a terrorist is ready to die in order to kill perceived enemies, whether American, Israelis, or Iraqis. Rene's contention was that mankind can no longer make war or peace. We're stuck. The Adam Bomb has called our bluff. He said, What everyone knows, the next time we push the button could be the last time. We race towards the end. Asheve Klausewitz made a storm in Paris, but it didn't make a storm here. So maybe it's time for us to unpack it a little. This remarkable little book is too often written off as the end of the world, end of life madness, but sometimes madness brings vision. Some of you may not be familiar. How many of you are familiar with Gerard's work, Rene Girard's work? Oh wow. That's wonderful. So a quick introduction. Renee was all about imitation or mimesis. According to scientists, it begins within moments after birth. Imitation is necessary for human survival. We imitate our parents, we learn to walk and talk with their help, and we need the help of many others before we even get to kindergarten. Mimesis is everything. It's grand to feel that we are wholly original and never imitate anybody, but in fact, imitation is the only way we can move forward. Imitation is how you learn to speak, how you master a traitor profession. It's how we bond. You like that book? I liked it too. It's how you learn to recognize a joke or comprehend a conversational nuance. It's why you don't eat spaghetti with your hands. We owe a lot more to our mothers than we think. They teach us what to imitate and how to imitate. It's called child rearing. The people around us also teach us what to want. To be totally original would be to be totally asocial. What do we want? The short answer is we want what others want. We want it because they want it, and we want more of it than they have. We mirror and reciprocate and reciprocate desire. Desire is a psychological ping-pong match. Whether we're reciprocating with kisses or punches, people imitate. Imitation is also how do we go to war? I'm sorry. Also, how we go to war. And that was the subject of the controversial book, which had a clamorous reception in Paris. Ashevek Clausewitz took as its point of departure the Prussian general and military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, the author of On War. Rene was fascinated by him, and in true mimetic form, I became fascinated with Renee's fascination. Mimetic, you see. Are we really battling to the end? I asked him. Then Renee changed scale, as he did toward the end of his life. Turning his eyes upward, so to speak, he said, To make the revelation wholly good and not threatening at all, humans have only to adopt the behavior recommended by Christ, abstain completely from retaliation, and renounce the mimetic escalation to extremes. Indeed, if the escalation to extremes continues a little longer, it will lead straight to the extinction of all life on the planet. Where does it all begin? All desire is a desire for being. who we imagine have the right stuff. We imitate their habits, read the books, they read, hang out at their parties with their friends. They sense our appropriation and resist. We hope by proximity to get what they've got, and so eventually we become their rivals, at first politely, perhaps, then less so. When frustrated, we humans tend to resort to hostility and then force. Pretty soon the rivalry escalates to the point that whatever goal they had in mind becomes secondary. Whatever we wanted from the other, whatever the point of the contest was, disappears. Doesn't matter. The rivals are in naked contest with each other. They want what the others they want the other to be snubbed, vanquished, gone, or at least humiliated. Soon everyone wants a piece of the action. Friends take sides. These conflicts provide a chance to bend. I'm sorry, the light's a little bit bad, to bond with others, which is to say, imitate them. Too often fighting is how we bond, as well as how we destroy. Look at the irrational hatred directed at political figures, we will never meet. Hatred is our mimetic glue. Each side attracts more adherence and the animosity intensifies. Events snowball gathering momentum as they roll downhill. Who started it anyway? Nobody cares anymore. The distance between us saves us. A mimetic circuit breaker. But the problem is distance disappears in a mimetic meltdown. The socialist solution at hand is to find a scapegoat who can be blamed for all the trouble. An outsider whose disappearance will mean little. In archaic societies, the sacrifice might involve murder or exile. In our society? Well, consider the case of Justine Sacco. How many of you have heard of her? There we go. Justine Sacco, a 30-year-old New York corporate communication executive who made an ill-advised joke on Twitter as she was boarding a plane to Cape Town. By the time she arrived in South Africa, there was a mob to meet her at the airport. She had also lost her job as well as her reputation because of a tweet. These mass crazes and hysterias are easy to forget because we are literally not ourselves when we join the mob. We relinquish our identities along with reason and judgment when we melt into the masses. No one is responsible because everyone is. No one remembers afterwards. It is surprisingly easy to disavow one's human responsibility in a crowd. In ten years, no one will remember joining the mob shrieking curses at Trump or Jews or any other targets. After all, we were not ourselves when we joined the mob. We are mimetic creatures who want to be one of the guys, so I make a prediction. Most of the participants in the worst woke accesses of the last decade will completely forget, even deny, that they were participants, along with the violent demonstrations of the last few years, the political extremism. I dare not name social and medical experiments that have not yet been formally debunked. They'll be gone. Not because the erstwhile participants are deliberately whitewashing themselves, but again because when people join mobs, they're not themselves, and so such things are easy to forget and rationalize later. More example. How many people will remember the crazes of the last decade that were seen a reasonably attractive and up-to-date thing to do? Think of the lobotomies or electric shock therapies of past decades, or in the present, the plastic surgeries, Botox, and tummy tucks, or liposuction to make a new me, a better me, so that I can look like some rock star or television celebrity I have never met, never will meet. I will look more like my best friend, even better than my best friend. Well, that's mimetic desire in a nutshell. Renee's corpus is generating a lot of interest nowadays. People sometimes say it is abstruse and hard, and it can be with all the skill of scholarly bells and whistles, with its range of applications and influences, its reference to famous European thinkers, but at bottom it's straightforward. Again, we want what others want. We want it because they want it, and we want more of it than the other guy has. Inevitably, it is something we lack or imagine we like, otherwise we would not want it. As an example, Renee Girard observed that the most mimetic institution of all is a capitalistic one. The stock market. What could be more mimetic than that? He said in an interview, you desire stock not because it is objectively not because it isn't memetic uh intrinsically desirable, you know nothing about it. But you desire stuff exclusively because other people desire it. And if other people desire it, its value goes up and up and up. Therefore, in a way, he said, mimetic desire is an absolute monarch. Inevitably there will be a collapse, which is also lacking in objectivity. Just as a fashionable woman in Balzac, when she's abandoned by a lover, may be abandoned by all other potential lovers at the same time. It's a total disaster for her. She becomes like a stock that has lost its value. What follows a successful scapegoating is a social interlude of peace and reconciliation. Why not? The scapegoat has been eliminated, and peace follows. The peace is what people remember. Perhaps no one described it more eloquently than theologian James Allison, a longtime colleague of Rene's, writing after the destruction of the World Trade Towers in 2001. He wrote, Immediately the sacrificial center began to generate, the sort of reaction that sacrificial centers are supposed to generate, a feeling of unanimity and grief. He continued, phrases began to appear to the effect of we're all Americans now, a purely fictitious feeling for most of us. It was staggering to watch the togetherness build up around the sacred center, quickly consecrated as ground zero, a togetherness that would harden over the coming hours into flag waving, a huge upsurge in religious services and observances, religious leaders suddenly taken seriously, candles, shrines, prayers, all the accoutrement of the religion of death. And there was the grief. How we enjoy grief. It makes us feel good and innocent. This is what Aristotle meant by catharsis, and it has deeply sinister echoes of dramatic tragedies, roots, and sacrifice. One of the effects of the violent sacred around the sacred center, a sacrificial center is to make those present feel justified, feel morally good, a counterfactual goodness which suddenly takes us out of our little betrayals, acts of cowardice, uneasy consciences. Renee argues that this murderous process is the birthplace of religion. Sacrifice as the salvation of a society. Consider the pharaonic send-offs we give assassinated political leaders. Robert and John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Anwar Sadat. The list keeps growing. Think of the sacrifices of the last month alone, all the killings from distant parts in the world. Whenever we think of a killing or expulsion solves a problem, we turn to it. Auden wrote, W. H. Auden wrote, all of challenge would reply, it was a monster with one red eye, a crowd that saw him die, not I. The coup de grâce, a complete denial of one's participation. One simply doesn't remember the event in any self-critical way. One was swept away by the momentum and self-righteousness of the mob, the mob that leads us to sacrifice and murder. How did it all begin? A more contemporary question might be: where does it stop? That's the question Renee asked at the end of his life. With TikTok, YouTube, Twitter, Zoom, fads fade and disappear faster than we can buy, find, or adopt them. Where do I locate myself in these ephemeral landscapes? I am not an innocent. None of us are. So what do we do? Too often the stakes and what we observe of mimetic envy seem trivial, the office spat, the casual slight. But those small stakes, occasions, are not where we can begin to make a change, precisely because they are small. I'm sorry, occasions are where we can begin to make a change precisely because they are small. Often we want to start with mushroom clouds, anti-nuclear movements, and not our personal interaction, where forgiveness, mercy, and love begin. My Facebook threads and Twitter feeds offer an unending invective about public figures and political leaders, and I can easily see that some of us are prepared to spend the next four years in a rage and blame against the terrible other, rather than healing, rather than the constant regeneration of our hearts and conscience. As St. Paul said, do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Idealistic? Perhaps. How do we do it? But that's where we begin. Not waiting for a lightning bolt to strike us, but unflagging daily service and humble self-abnegation. I have to admit I'm not very good at it. Well, I expect few of us are. We also might give forgiveness a shot. I often cite Renee's imperative at the end of his book, The Scapegoat. You've probably, many of you have heard it. The time has come for us to forgive one another. If we wait any longer, there will not be time enough. But there is no time, but now. The time has run out. We actually have to do something, not just think something. It's harder than we imagine. Forgiveness is in a mysterious and elusive process. What is the actual action of forgiveness? How do we bend our mind to it? How many times have we forgiven and found resentment and blame sneaking back into our habits? In our modern times of endless therapy, forgiveness is too often seen as self-help rather than an internal revolution and reorientation, a real attempt to reach the other. Certainly there are gradations of forgiveness. Forgiving someone who cuts you off in traffic is different scale than someone who commits a murder and forgiving that. One reason it's so hard to forgive, I think, is we find forgiveness is not a one-time only. We must do it again and again, often with the same person, who, like us, is flawed and may repeat the same offense over and over, whether it's a theft or a merciless sharp tongue. I have one. We don't change easily, but we can ask for forgiveness. We can give it. It is the only superpower we have. Forgiveness also has the power to transform destructive mimesis to good mimeses, mimesis with compound interest. It is that powerful. However, when Renee urged us to forgiveness, I don't think he was only thinking of shaking hands after an argument. Here's what it's like to amp it up to the max. Let's go deeper. There are instances where real forgiveness takes not hours, but generations. Here's the best forgiveness story I know. Many of you know it already. Renee often described the story of the Old Testament Joseph, son of Jacob, and his mob of ten envious and resentful half-brothers. Renee called it a counter-mythical story because in archaic myth the lynchers are always satisfied with their lynching. But here the story takes a different twist. Keep in mind the rancorous history. Jacob was tricked into laboring seven years to earn a wife he didn't want, Leah. He then labored seven more years for her sister, his beloved Rachel. He gets her. One big happy family, right? No chance. Generations, as I said. The hostility of those two women through the years embittered everything they touched. They fought unendingly, and the animosity continued to the next generation, where the twelve sons of Jacob, including the favorite Joseph, the son of beloved Rachel. Initially, the brothers plan to kill Joseph, and together they throw him into a pit. But one of them, Judah, has a better idea. To sell him into slavery instead. Through the years of slavery in Egypt that followed, Joseph establishes himself as one of the lead one of the sorry. Is there water somewhere? Oh well. Thank you. I can keep it here, sorry. Through the years of Salad, Joseph establishes Joseph establishes himself as one of the leaders of the kingdom. After many plot twists, Joseph tearfully forgives his ten brothers in a dramatic reconciliation scene in the Egyptian palace. I recommend the magnificent translation of the Biblical Hebrew by another McDonald Dermot lecturer, Robert Alter. He describes in fascinating detail how Joseph tests his brothers, especially when he demands that they go back and return with their brother Benjamin, the only other child of Jacob's beloved Rachel, born of the rivalry that poisoned the family. After all, Joseph has no reason to believe they haven't killed Benjamin too. Why would they not? Why would Judah not? But this is the figure who interests me, is Judah, the very brother who had the idea to monetize the elimination of his brother. During the dialogue at the Egyptian palace, Judah is transformed. He says his father's heart would break with the loss of Jen Benjamin. He who had maliciously, recklessly shredded his father's heart before, now accepts the bitter pill of his father's outrageous favoritism. Judah, the man who was willing to enslave his brother, now begs to offer himself as a slave instead. The wailing of Joseph in the recognition scene was so loud and unrestrained that as it is written, the Egyptians heard and the house of Pharaoh heard. Judah embraces the brothers who had attempted to kill him. We all admire Joseph. We imagine we'd like to be like him. But who wants to be Judah in his culpability, in his callousness, in his repentance, and his anguish? And yet the Jewish people are named for him. Renee maintained that this is the first story of forgiveness in all world history, two millennia before Christ. I didn't believe him. I searched in the Bible. I went through the Mahabharata and elsewhere, but I haven't been able to prove him wrong. When Joseph had all the cards to play and a golden opportunity to lash back, he didn't. Revenge was offered to him on a platter, and he extended his hand in peace instead. But the greatest forgiveness of all history belongs to Christ. After all, as he said from the cross, forgive them, they know not what they do. Why did Rene emphasize forgiveness so much in his writing? Because he was devoted to nonviolence, and because he was committed to anything that might loosen the terrible cycles of memetic retaliation. In a sense, it's a straight line from that to nuke to nukes. He also recognized that forgiveness gives us a matchless chance to partake in the nature of Christ Himself, who is all forgiveness. What is forgiveness? What is the action of forgiveness? How do we actually do the thing? How do we make it a permanent fixture of our being? Without some action, some practical expression in real life, it's little more than a passing thought, wishful thinking, a daydream. We must move from the general to the particular. Not mankind, but you, your boss, your kid, your cat, your dog, and the people you watch on the computer screens. But how do you forgive the murders and some of the worst crimes of the modern era? How? We look for an answer. So here we are. What do we do? How do we escape the endless cycles of rivalry and retaliation? The endless wish to be different than what we are, other than what we are. When we recognize the destructive effect we have had on the world, on other people, we finally confront the problem. It is us. You, me, all of us. Our minds were trying to grasp our predicament, trying to think our way out of it here at the end of time. Our mind won't our mind, I'm sorry. Our mind won't take us there, but forgiveness might. We can't underestimate how important Renee thought it was. Or even more beyond forgiveness, we can practice imitatio Christi, which embraces not only forgiveness, but invites us to join Christ in his action restoring the world. How do we escape this rivalrous trap? To imitate Christ is to do everything to avoid being imitated. Renee said that. Pro tip. I find the litany of humility helps. Rene called Imitatio Christi an essential anthropological discovery, a how-to book for avoiding mimetic entanglements and retaliation, a shortcut to sainthood, if you will, to God. Christ imitates the Father, as he said in the book of John, the Father and I are one, and we imitate Christ. Christ is the one we can imitate without fear of rivalry, since his gaze is set on the Father and his nonviolent love. According to Rene, imitating Christ thus means thwarting all rivalry. He added, We are brothers in Christ. As he sank into the withdrawal of his father, Christ invited each of us to model our will on that of his father. Hence he continued, to listen to the Father's silence is to abandon oneself to his withdrawal, to conform to it. Becoming a son of God means imitating this withdrawal, experiencing it with Christ. God is thus not immediately accessible, but immediately through his son and the story of salvation, which, as we have seen, takes on the paradoxical appearance of an escalation to extremes. That's a tall order. But isn't a tall order exactly what we want? We have to shift out of our usual perspective. The human blueprint was sent out in Genesis in the book of John, mapping out the relationship for which we were made. That is, we were made in his image and likeness. We must return to that idea again and again, let it settle and deepen within us. Rene said, No philosophical thought will master the shift to charity. In other words, we can talk about grand ideas till the cows come home. But how do we embrace the beggar, heal the broken, feed the hungry? Renee said, escaping from mimeticism in its most toxic forms is something only geniuses and saints can do. We must internalize these processes, make our imitation self-aware and evident. This, he said, would be nothing but the imitation of Christ. As it turned out, I was the last person to interview Renee, a QA that wound up in First Things, and eventually in my collection, Conversation, the other book that wasn't mentioned, Conversations with Renee Girard, Prophet of Envy, another edited volume. In our interview, he had said, I think ultimately the Christian view of violence will overcome everything, but we might consider this a great test. And I asked him, Do you really have that kind of confidence? He replied, I'm surprised I said that. Christianity will be victorious, but maybe in defeat. See what I mean? Because of the rules of the kingdom of God, in a world where there is no longer any sacrifice, where violence is no longer king, disorder may become such. You see, that's what these apocalyptic texts show. He continued, in a world which is no longer organized along rigid lines of scapegoating in the sacrificial system that follow the penal systems, you have more and more or disorder, more and more freedom, but more and more disorder. In short, all hell breaks loose. The end of I promise to take you to the end of time, and the end of the world that measures time, and I will. It's not hard to see. Wars are everywhere and everywhere talked about. Life is treated as disposable, and our citizenry is arming up to defend themselves against their neighbors. Riots tear apart our major cities, and people are killed on the streets, in Paris and Hamburg, and Chicago and Baltimore. Anti-Semitism is on the rise, even while the Holocaust is still in living memory, and the nuclear threat is still threatening. There's no one to blame because everyone is. The scapegoating mechanism that held disorder in order is kaput. Our courts and our police meet out justice of a kind, usually enough to keep our child our cities in check. We had better get used to it. Renee described the apocalypse to me as one long period, possibly lasting centuries. The words that keep resurfacing, as Renee talks and writes, are not about destruction, but from the Greek apocalypsis, revelation, unveiling. So long a period it will be definitely he said it would be difficult to spiritually survive. It sounds like now. This may be the apocalypse we've been fearing. But Renee insisted it brings hope. The last few times I spoke with him, he was Paul, pondering Paul's letter to the Thessalonians. The first is the oldest test text in the New Testament. The Thessalonians were not focused on creeds and rituals, but on it in a preparation for the promised end of the world. No one knows what will happen, but that hasn't stopped people throughout the centuries predicting it or stockpiling food or building offshore bunkers to save themselves from it. Rene's ruminations were more than an old man meditating on the end of the world because it is the end of his world. What is the apocalypse unveiling? The revelation of our own violence and our own inability to admit it. If our violence is revealed to us, we confront a choice. For Rene the choice was clear, the complete renunciation of violence. It returns us again to Imitasio Christi. Rene said, Christ allows us to face this reality without sinking into madness. The apocalypse does not announce the end of the world, it creates hope. If we suddenly see reality, we do not experience the absolute despair of an unthinking modernity, but rediscover a world where things have meaning. Hope is possible only if we dare to think about the danger at hand. On another visit, I asked him again the inevitable question, so what do we do? Nothing spectacular, Renee said. But we must try not to surrender to the spiritual decadence of our time and rise above the world around us. How do we live in apocalyptic times? For Renee Girard, the response to his understanding was obvious. He was a practicing Catholic, and he could be found every Sunday on a back pew in the Gregorian and Polyphonic Mass at St. Thomas Aquinas in Palo Alto. I was there too. Other than that, he tried not to get caught in mumetic momentums, avoid retaliation and revenge, and forgive everyone for everything, as Dostoevsky wrote so movingly in the Brothers Karamazov, a book Renee loved, and pursue the past imitatio Christi. Renee said, all our attitudes are really a deepening of the crisis of faith which the early 20th century called modernism. The church has never been a scapegoat more than it is today. He added, but we must see the symbolic value of this. Whatever the church may have lost by its compromises with the world, its enemies now give back to it by obliging it to play the same role as Christ. This is its true vocation. Meanwhile, we wait. All of us. Renee told me the end times will be very long and monotonous, so mediocre and uneventful from a religious and spiritual standpoint that the danger of dying spiritually, even for the best of us, will be very great. This is a harsh lesson, but ultimately one of hope rather than despair. But let's let the end of the world call back to us through time. What would it tell us? What should we be learning now? What can we be doing now? What does the future demand of us? Now, while there is still time, while we are still alive. It would be grand to say I own my own desires, but that would be a lie I tell to console myself. Not daily, but hourly. What is an authentic desire? One that is not mimetic. What would it look like? Like Judah, we try again and fail again and try again and again. Whether Rene took us to the end of the world, he took us to the end of his world, as he slowly faded into darkness in his final years. The day after Renee's majestic funeral mass in Palo Alto in 2015, a coordinated terrorist attack at a Paris concert hall left 130 people dead and wounded, and more than 400 wounded in a massacre. An odd coda for a life of warning about war and violence. Thank you. I'm not the know it all that knows everything and can answer anything, and I'd like to hear what you have to say too. As much as talk myself.

SPEAKER_15 45:23

Okay, so you mentioned the brothers Karamatza, which means I can ask this question. In the book, one of the priests, the stars, mentions that this mimetic rivalry will continue to the end, so that even if there are two people left on Earth, one will kill the other. But then he says, and then he will turn on himself because he has nowhere else to turn. How does that reflect the nature of self-destruction, especially with suicide, or what happens in the absence of a scapegoat?

SPEAKER_07 46:08

Dostoevsky. I don't have any magic answers. Does anybody else have any thoughts on this?

SPEAKER_09 46:18

Buddhette, I'm counting on you because he well uh one can become a rival to one's ideal self. And then love and and then hate oneself for not overcoming the obstacles. And that can turn, yes, suicidal. I that is a wonderful um insight on on the part of Dostoevsky. Um but it's it's one of the more subtle involutions of of mimetic desire that you create a rival imaginatively and then are subjugated to it. Um may I ask a question now? Sure. All right. Well, actually it's it's partly an observation. Probably around 2005. Uh I remember talking with René and um and uh Bob Hamerton Kelly was there a bunch of it was it was one of the ordinary meetings. And um somebody, it could have been Gil Bailey, brought brought up the idea of pacifism, and he leaned back and said, I am not a pacifist.

SPEAKER_04 47:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_09 47:38

He was not a pacifist. Um and we should um address the distinction between defense and retaliation, between defense and and and mimetic escalation, because there is legitimate defense, and he did acknowledge that.

SPEAKER_07 48:00

I don't think that we have much alternative, do we really? I mean, we have to. I mean, if someone comes in and robs your house, you know, you don't say, Oh money, pad me, bad me home, I mean you do something. It's not an ideal, but I don't have a magic answer on how we solve the fact that if you are not punching, you are going to be the punchy or the person uh punchy.

SPEAKER_08 48:27

Well, and at least I would suggest that the the first thing we need to do in trying to sort out that problem is to distinguish individual retaliation, individual violence, pushing this person, from the collective violence, which is a tricky one. I mean that's and and a lot of you know derived it certainly shows the roots of it going back to the individual medical rivalry, but still the sacrifice phenomenon comes out of collective violence. And in the same way with war, it's just not the same as personal self-defense. So you can make arguments for both kinds of defense, I think. But I just try to sort out how to set up the problem, I'd like to see those two things separated first.

SPEAKER_13 49:32

Thank you so much. Um after your talk, it was much easier for me to see the connection with Jared's work and another French philosopher you mentioned at the end of your introduction to all desires, desire for being, Emmanuel Levinas. And I was wondering if, with your expertise uh both biographically and with Jarard's work, if you could talk about whether they engage each other personally or professionally.

SPEAKER_07 50:02

I actually don't know. Is anybody here? I know that I heard many discussions about levinas, but um Trevor, you want to take that?

SPEAKER_03 50:10

I I don't ru I don't know either, but I do know I'm pretty sure they were invited to the same breakfast with Pope John Paul II in Rome.

SPEAKER_06 50:25

Hello. Um so thinking about mimetic desire, and you said it is that we want to be the best of what others want. Um and so that object is somewhat arbitrary and subjective. And so, in a way, because we decide based on others' opinions, it seems like likely that what human beings want is rather the adoration of others and to want them to be jealous of us, um, and that kind of attention, in a way, possibly a kind of love from other people, because if you get what they want, it's almost a self-conscious idea of that they will love you. Um and so then memetic desire is if taken in that way, it could be a desire for love that is obviously excessive and disordered, but it's almost instinctive in human beings for that kind of love. So taken within the right context, with the right model being Christ, mimetic desire would not in fact be wrong. Would that be correct?

SPEAKER_07 51:44

I think any imitation of Christ is a good idea. It leads us away from. I mean, we imagine each other. I mean, that's it. You know, we pick somebody that we think has it all together, or we we idolize each other. And we inevitably we find out that the person is not what we wanted, and we we don't see that the problem is the problem of our desire. We think we just found the wrong person. And so we begin the whole process again and we get disillusioned again. It becomes endless. I mean, the the problem is our disorder of desire.

SPEAKER_01 52:23

I was wondering if you could talk about why maybe he's popular among Silicon Valley types. Was this a popularity that um occurred while he was still alive? Or has it been more of a recent thing, and did he really think about his relationship with this particular industry?

unknown 52:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_07 52:42

Um Trevor might know more than I do about that, but uh I don't think Renee uh knew Peter Thiel. Uh Peter Thiel had considered him as a sort of mentor. Um a lot of myths have grown up around that. Um a funny story. Somebody asked me. Um, how did that happen? Somebody asked me uh if Renee and and uh Peter had gone out. I'd gone out the the myth that Renee Tamar Peter Thiel, for example, uh, was not a student of Renee's, but they did know each other, and Peter had enormous respect for him. Um and somebody wanted to answer a question for a book he was writing. And he wanted to run over to Renee's house and ask him the answer to this question, and I had to convince him that Renee was not sitting on a lotus blossom answering questions that Renee lived a normal domestic life, and and it was not it was not like it was imagined, so a lot of mythologies have grown up around this. I don't know why why the Silicon Valley has been so fascinated. Does any Silicon Valley types do they have any thoughts? I live in Silicon Valley, but I am not of Silicon Valley. I'm a writer. I sit in the room by myself.

SPEAKER_09 54:12

I'd like to touch on a little of that. I think Peter actually did take one course from Renee. Um I think it might have been the Shakespeare course, I'm not sure. Um the fact is that of course he recognized that that um all this uh electronic stuff was was mimetic and that's how you could make money off it. And of course that's how the Silicon Valley people see it uh or saw it initially in in terms of you know invest in Facebook, it's going to work. Um so so that's clear. But there are good things. I mean, mimetic desire is not entirely altogether disordered or bad. We do that's how we make friends, that's how we raise children.

SPEAKER_07 55:02

It's um how we learn to read it.

SPEAKER_09 55:05

How we learn to read, how we learn to it's especially our capacity to imagine ourselves in the place of the other. And that is the root of human freedom, which is that that capacity, well, Dante says it, you know, love is the basis of all our sin, as well as the basis of all our um greatest virtue.

SPEAKER_11 55:30

When I think of Girard, and I think of the mimetic cycle, I think that he gives us a subtle, sophisticated account of the sociality, of envy, of inglorious desire, and the way that it conceals itself in our lives. It's powerful. Um then I wonder about the the compass, the expanse, the scope of mematic theory. And what kept what keeps coming back to me is the worry someone like content was restilling how do you know that deep down beneath your most basic seemingly innocent love, there isn't some love of self. This is an important moment, okay? But I don't think there's a kind of worry that I think is posed by this way of thinking about things. If mimetic desire is pervasive, if it's mimetic desire all the way down, then it strikes me that we can't account for love that isn't self-motivated, that isn't really actually uh giving of oneself to another without some triangulation, without some uh something that would undermine the purity of love. And I I don't know if I've like I said, I don't I'm not sure if I was able to pull that together, but that is that's my response to um the ideas.

SPEAKER_12 57:42

I'm not gonna reply to that, uh, but I would love to hear a reply to that because I I found that fascinating. Um in the spirit of this being a conversation, and I I um I first encountered Gerard's thought when I was in graduate school, and I was thinking a lot about what um you might call positive imitation. So I was working on Aristotle's thinking about um friendship and how the friend is another self, and I was thinking about the way in which progress in the formation of your character is motivated by imitation. And um what fascinated me about Girard is here was a man wrestling with, let's say, the dark side of imitation. And perhaps one of the reasons why Trevor was surprised that I cited Girard approvingly in more than one spot. Um and I'm honored that he actually paid attention to something I I wrote. Um he he and my mom and and my wife and and some um uh obscure scholars. Um the the um but it Girard was was correcting Aristotle in in a certain way by exploring the dark side was was what I thought. Um but but there really is a bright side, and I want to I want to um give three cheers for self-love properly understood, um, and and just suggest that um it's uh self-abnegation in all its purity is um uh uh perhaps maybe the the wrong way to think of what we're after in the imitatio Christi, where um we're we're enjoined by Christ to love others as we love ourselves. And I think we are enabled to love ourselves because of the friendship that's extended to us. You know, Aquinas in the second part of the second part of the Summa defines charity as God's friendship with man. And it's by means of that friendship, he argues, that we can actually love ourselves and extend love to others. So um, you know, maybe that's a partial response to Dr. Idle. Um, but I I'm interested what what what you would make of that.

SPEAKER_07 1:00:28

We should be aware of um all the negative things we imitate and also the positive ones. I don't think it's a one-way street.

SPEAKER_12 1:00:38

Yeah, but but I I guess I I I'm I'm my thesis here is that um love in its in its purest form entails self-love.

SPEAKER_07 1:00:50

Okay. Trevor.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:53

Does everybody remember when J.D. Vance told everybody to Google Ordo Amoris? So I did, and I was I was you know and I was reading this very hard, and this is what struck me about it was that he says that our s if if we didn't if if we didn't love ourselves sort of first, we could sin to prevent our neighbor from sinning. And and then he says this other thing, it's so I mean it's just so mind-blowing. It's like our souls are closer to our neighbors' souls than they are to our own bodies. And so, in order to love ourselves, we have to give up our bodies for the sake of the neighbor. I just yeah.

SPEAKER_07 1:01:32

Can you say that again?

SPEAKER_03 1:01:33

Well, no, I probably misquoted it. But there's certainly somebody here who can quote it for Bana. But but I just think that this is like it is a mind-blowing insight, and it is, it's I I think it's really worth reflecting on.

SPEAKER_04 1:01:48

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:52

I think that um I might have a helpful uh connection here. So with the idea of forgiveness. In the story about Joseph is a very beautiful line that tells his brothers what you meant for evil, God meant for good, you know, to work through this to save the lives of many people. And it strikes me that the capacity to forgive seems to involve the ability to see what one's enemy has done turned to a blessing for oneself. Good has been worked through the injury. And so the ability to see it as a good, you know, caught up within a larger narrative, of course, um, means that one sees, you know, that is a good for me. So that I am able to love this because I love myself. I embrace the good as something fulfilling me. But that line also has the relativization of the self-love because it's a good for me within God's larger providence. And so I think that I can love myself for God's sake. That's the highest degree of love for St. Bernard, where I do love myself, but because God loves me and has a desire for my life within this integrated whole. And so it strikes me that an appropriate self-love, self-love for God's sake, is essential in order to be able to forgive the enemy, because I have to be able to see what that enemy has done ultimately as working for the good of all those who love God. And so to be blessed by the enemy, I think, is part of forgiveness. And so I must allow myself to be blessed, to be enriched.

SPEAKER_11 1:03:34

This doesn't matter at all, but I I wrote my dissertation on the order of love and St. Thomas Aquinas, and there's a chapter on self-love and everything. I just completely resonate with all these remarks. In the Kantian sense, which is the sense I'm in, self-love's a pejorative thing. It would be you would be scandalized to find out that you someone who you took to love you for your own sake was motivated in a way that undermined undermined the depth, the character, the presumed intimacy of that love. And the I I the I guess the question I'm trying to pose is more has to do with the mimetic theory. As I understand it, goes, it goes like this. All of my desires are for some goods, but those desires are mediated by my at least tacit recognition of someone else having those same goods and seeing it's wow, it's desirable that I might have the same goods that someone else has. Okay? And so if all of my love is like that, if all of my love is at bottom, I mean there's a kind of surface depth distinction, and it's built up on the some kind of cycle that says, well, I take this to be good and desire it so because I've seen that other people take it to good and desire it uh in the same way. And what I really want is to be like those people, then it seems like there's a good bit of our lives that kind of is rendered inexplicable because I just don't think all of our love's like that.

SPEAKER_05 1:05:26

Um thank you. So I had a quick thought about um the the good, or sorry, I just the good becoming the bad turning into the good because what people did that was bad to us can lead to a good thing for us in some way, so forgiveness is possible. And I feel like it really is um it reminds me of Dante in the um Inferno when he gets dipped into the river and he forgets all the bad things he did. Um and it it just becomes like it. Only the good is remains, like his penance that he got from the bad, or the learning that he got. Um, so maybe if if you think about that, then all the even if all of your desires are mimetic and a mixture of the base and the sublime, it's okay because in heaven all of the bases turn into the sublime.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:19

Uh Renee Girard was roughly of that generation that followed the post-World War II generation. Uh, in other words, the 1945 to 1960, where, especially in France, existentialism, Sarka, and so forth, was so prominent. And that collapsed in the 1960s when it was replaced by structuralism and uh postmodernism, and so forth. Now I know he knew uh uh Derrida, um, you know, one of the leading uh postmodern uh thinkers, and I can't imagine that he agreed with them, that it's all language and so forth. But one of the others who in a certain way he reminds me of is Michel Foucault. That is, although Foucault, in his mainstay, felt largely society forms the individual, and we form our identities as the society, the people in charge, so to speak, shape us. But toward the end in his so-called Christian term, Foucault said, no, going back and for the first time seriously reading the Greek thinkers and the early Christians, Christianity gave the possibility, and indeed the fact, of self-formation. That we were not simply puppets. Foucault died, who knows where he would have gone with that, if his thinking. But the point that is interesting to me is there is whereas Foucault said, we're formed, as kind of use a crude metaphor like puppets, by people who uh we understand ourselves the way the society dictates. And this and and and and um uh Girard seemed to take it the other way. We come up and imitate, not form, but we look to uh and model ourselves on the desires for what others have. But both seem to wind up with the idea that there is self-formation, in other words, turning away from that and to getting the imitatio christi, and Foucault's uh looking at the early church fathers, there truly is self-formation by looking at Christ. And I'm just wondering, did uh uh Girard have any interaction with the French, besides Derrida, with the French postmodernists and especially with Foucault, because certain ways there's certain parallels.

SPEAKER_07 1:09:19

Well, he he he was one of the directors of the 1966 conference where uh all that was unleashed into the world. So yes, he was at the heart of it. Do you send anything to say, Trevor?

SPEAKER_03 1:09:35

Well, I mean, I could say yes. Yes. And there's actually, I mean, there's there's there's a correspondence that I mean as President Sanford knows, they were both at Buffalo at the same time. Yeah. And uh there's a wonderful letter that Michel Foucault wrote to Renee Girard. There's a wonderful letter that Michel Foucault wrote to Renee Girard that has been discovered and included in a recent biography of Girard uh that has 200 pages of endnotes, so it's not as easy as uh but but it I hope it'll be translated soon. Um so I think it's I think it's a very fruitful uh avenue of exploration. And at the most recent uh colloquium on violence and religion annual meeting in Mexico City, there was a long paper uh by Jeff Schulenberger, the editor of Compact Magazine, about Girard and Foucault. And it was superb. I hope it'll be published.

SPEAKER_07 1:10:31

I wanted to currect a kind of lingering misperception, I think, and it's not just in this room, it's in the people who read about Girard. We tend to associate mimesis with bad mimesis, and that's not at all true, and we have to always keep in mind we learn to read mimetically, we read, learn to just sing on key, mimetically, that we do everything that we do that's positive is also mimetic, that it's not just obviously if if you've got a healthy kidney disease, kids are worried about the bad things, but the point is mimetic behavior is good and bad, and it depends on a lot of other factors the way you use it. Anyway.

SPEAKER_14 1:11:13

Thank you. Um in his book, I see Satan Fall Like Weather, the thesis seems to be that the single victim mechanism uh is revealed by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. And I want to key in on that word uh revealed or unveiled. Uh part of your lecture tonight was talking about the sort of apocalyptic interest that Gerard had. I wondered um, did he continue this sort of um idea of Christ's saving action as revelatory and in thinking about our sort of contemporary era?

SPEAKER_07 1:11:49

Um thinking about our contemporary era?

SPEAKER_14 1:11:53

In the sort of apocalypse, I mean apocalypse, uh revealing or revelations, yeah. Like, what was it with an eye to um like Christ's work being continued with us? Even in I see Satanfall like lightning. Uh huh. He talks about how the sort of uh scapegoat myth in some ways is continued in an attenuated form into the medieval era through you know myths of the guy that comes to town and offers to take away all of your problems, but you have to resist, you know. You know, it's a sort of different take on like the uh pre-Christian uh scapegoating myths that are revealed by Christ and continue to be revealed by Christ, it seems is part of his book. Um even in the last two chapters of I see Satan fall like lightning, he's talking about like a sort of modern um victim kind of uh obsession after World War II. But he also talks about the Nietzsche tradition. So it seemed like he had a real interest in uh sort of the continued, like Satan fell, right? I see Satan fall like lightning, he's fallen to the earth and he's bound, but there's a sort of ongoing process. And so I I wondered, maybe in the last book that you were mentioning, or something like that, if there's something of a continuation of that thought that Jesus Christ is continuing to unveil Satan.

SPEAKER_15 1:13:20

What makes Christianity a non-nemetic religion if we are all united in a fight against a single adversary, namely the devil?

SPEAKER_07 1:13:32

Are we in a fight with the with the devil? I mean, we're we're trying to aspire as well as you know, avoid. Well, I don't understand why, how are we engaging personally with Satan?

SPEAKER_15 1:13:49

Well, I guess in the one sense, we're engaged in battle to win the souls of men. And the scriptures have a strong sense, especially that I with the well, you have the sense in the church of Saint Ignatius's two banners, you either fight with Christ or you fight with the devil. Or you you have the um stay sober and alert. Your opponent, the devil, your opponent, the devil, is probably like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour. Resist him, solid in your faith. So, and then also with the Greek name of the devil, means opposite. The one who is opposed. Opposed to I guess he opposes God.

SPEAKER_07 1:14:49

We don't want to go there. I mean we're aspiring, you know, we get to choose which direction we go. I don't know. I don't quite understand. When Renee wrote this, this is my own personal feeling. When he wrote this book, this is because this was towards the end of his life. Um he didn't resolve all these questions. He didn't have all he died. And these were the questions that he ended his life with, and I find that they're fascinating. But I don't think he came up with an answer for a lot of this, so this is gonna be things that we're thinking about and working through for years to come. Me too. Um that's why I wanted to have a discussion with all of you. It might be an oracle, because I'm not an oracle. I'm with you and just trying to understand and explore this. It was a very it's a very interesting book, and I recommend it, even though most of it is about military strategy in the nineteenth century.